Vehicle mileage is tracked and recorded for a variety of functions. In general, vehicle mileage is a measure of the cost associated with operating the vehicle, as well as a measure of the wear to a vehicle. Mileage may be relevant for individual vehicle trips, for longer term intervals of mileage or time, for accumulated mileage by individual drivers, and for the overall accumulated of the vehicle.
Vehicle mileage intervals are commonly used as the primary means for determining scheduled maintenance of vehicles. Manufacturers and car dealers specify recommended or warranty required maintenance intervals which are typically based on the distance the vehicle has been driven, sometimes in conjunction with calendar intervals. For example, recommending an oil change every 7,500 miles or 6 months. A few automobile manufacturers include on-board computer devices for notifying the driver that scheduled service is recommended, but most do not. Thus scheduled service is easily missed, particularly if the driver is unaware of the schedule, or when the last service was performed. Additionally, service interval information is generally unavailable to interested and authorized third parties, such as dealerships or other repair facilities. With such information available, these third parties would have an opportunity to offer timely premium and discounted services directly and tailored to the individual needs of the vehicle owners.
Individual vehicle trips driven by a vehicle are commonly logged as a measure of cost. Such cost may then be assigned to an individual or purpose as an expense. Without a data connection to the vehicle, this is a tedious process at best. A vehicle owner may wish to track the mileage driven by multiple drivers of a single vehicle. A useful extension of this capability is to track the driven mileage on multiple vehicles and by one or more drivers, such as in a family, a set of company vehicles, or in a municipal vehicle fleet. The collection and tracking of such vehicle information are well known vehicle telematics applications.
Solutions to mileage tracking and corresponding telematics applications invariably utilize some combination of vehicle sensors and aftermarket installed hardware in the vehicle. For example, a number of systems have been proposed or are on the market, such as in Lightner U.S. Pat. No. 6,636,790, which utilize on-board diagnostic (OBD II) data available with vehicles manufactured after 1996. For such aftermarket systems, the installed device connects into the vehicle OBD II port and must reliably accept the input in a considerable number of different data protocols and from proprietary data feeds. An additional difficulty with these devices is interference with the diagnostic process, as service technicians normally use the OBD II port for scanning the car's computer systems for fault codes, which help in the diagnosis of the vehicle problems. This typically requires that the aftermarket add on device be uninstalled and the dealer's scan tool attached to the port. After the procedure is done, the device has to be installed and the setup routine must be performed and the device must be re-configured. Additionally, due to the security sensitive nature of the information, including potential modification of the data if access is available, distance traveled is generally not a record available through the OBD II data connection. The accumulated mileage value must be estimated or inferred from other available sensor data, which may be impossible without a reference value.
Other approaches to location tracking and accumulated mileage include the use of a location aware sensor in a device, such as in a GPS based navigation system, see Villevielle 55433802. Similar systems are available for vehicle navigation tracking and personal sports navigation. As applied to a vehicle system, however, these systems have significant shortcomings, including no capability to reliably couple the use of the device in conjunction with a particular vehicle, no capability to integrate with other drivers in records for a single vehicle, and no capability to identify and segregate mileage for a single driver among multiple vehicles.
Currently, no system is available for accumulating, recording and communicating the mileage of one or more vehicles by one or more mobile devices automatically, utilizing only the sensor systems available to the mobile device, and minimal user input.